News Flashes

IT and businesses don't always see eye to eye when it comes to overall goals within an enterprise. To address this glaring issue, Anne Buff, business solutions manager and thought leader for SAS Best Practices, a thought leadership organization at SAS Institute, discussed aligning data strategy goals at Data Summit 2016.

What does the Oracle DBA need to know about NoSQL? Charles Pack, technical director, CSX Technology, answered that question in a session at Data Summit 2016 titled "Oracle NoSQL for the Oracle RDBMS DBA." The Oracle NoSQL Database offers benefits and Oracle DBAs have the opportunity to add it to their portfolios, according to Pack, who covered where the NoSQL database fits in within the overall Oracle ecosystem. "It is not a replacement for all your databases. It is a piece in the puzzle," emphasized Pack.

Big data represents an enormous shift for IT, said Craig S. Mullins in a presentation at Data Summit 2016 in NYC that looked at what relational database professionals need to know about big data technologies. Mullins, a principal of Mullins Consulting, and the author of the DBA Corner column for DBTA, provided an overview of the changes that have taken place in the DBTA arena in recent years, and the key technologies that are having high impact.

At Data Summit 2016, Robin A. Thottungal, the EPA's first chief data scientist, explained how the agency is becoming more data-driven and shared some of challenges and the innovative solutions taken by the agency in implementing real-time monitoring of environmental parameters about the current state of our ecosystem.

The pace of technology is moving faster than ever and more enterprises are struggling with how to keep up to date with their data architecture. John O'Brien, principal analyst and CEO, at Radiant Advisors, discussed how to design and implement data architecture for the ever evolving big data world during Data Summit 2016.

At the center of the new big data movement is the Hadoop framework, which provides an efficient file system and related ecosystem of solutions to store and analyze big datasets. The Hadoop ecosystem was addressed from two points of view in a session at Data Summit 2016. James Casaletto, principal solutions architect, Professional Services at MapR, presented a talk titled "Harnessing the Hadoop Ecosystem," and Tassos Sarbanes, mathematician / data scientist, Investment Banking at Credit Suisse, covered the advantages of HBase in a talk titled "HBase Data Model - The Ultimate Model on Hadoop."

Despite the increasing focus on offering more access to more users in organizations, ad hoc querying of big data remains a problem for most, according to Jair Aguirre, data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, who presented a session at Data Summit 2016 titled "De-Siloing Data Using Apache Drill."

Data Summit 2016 kicked off at the New York Hilton Midtown earlier this month with keynote presentations by Ben Wellington, the creator of I Quant NY, and Nicholas Chandra, vice president of Cloud Customer Success at Oracle.